Many companies install and maintain software for use on a variety of distributed systems that can range from a single computer for a small business to a collection of servers and a plurality of user computer nodes for a large corporation. Also, the volume of data processed by a node in a small business can be a magnitude less than the volume of data processed by a node in a large corporation. Further, at different times the amount of data to be indexed for searching and the need for speed to search the indexed data can vary.
Additionally, the type of data processed by large and small business can vary widely, such as sending and receiving messages, creating and storing documents, hosting web sites, database searches, facilitating online transactions, and the like. Furthermore, the expense of developing and maintaining software that can handle the type and volume of data processed by a large corporation can be substantially greater than the effort expended to do somewhat the same for a small business. Consequently, cloud-based systems that provide software as a service axe increasingly popular with different sizes of businesses having different volumes of data and types of data.